On the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, President Erdoğan said Türkiye-Russia relations are now more advanced than at any earlier period, pointing to the Russian-built Akkuyu nuclear plant as one of the flagship projects. Putin highlighted growing people-to-people ties, noting that nearly seven million Russian tourists visited Türkiye in 2025.
Özgür Özel, who left the CHP in July with 90 lawmakers to form the new Yeni Parti (YP), said in a television interview that he personally takes responsibility for voting yes on the terror-free Türkiye law, which gives conditional deferral of sentences to PKK members not involved in acts of terrorism, while letting his own lawmakers vote freely. The law, part of the process after the PKK announced its dissolution, passed in August with a wide majority. Özel said a party that insists the issue belongs in parliament cannot then vote against it there.
The Istanbul Chamber of Industry's manufacturing PMI rose to 48.1 in August from 47.7 in July, a three-month high but still below the 50 threshold that separates growth from contraction. Both new orders and new export business fell, though at a slower pace than in July, and manufacturers cut production for a third straight month. Surveyed firms said the US-Iran conflict continues to weigh on demand and keep uncertainty elevated.
Turkish authorities intercepted 5,984 irregular migrants at sea in the first eight months of 2026, a 53 percent drop from 12,857 in the same period of 2025, according to figures through August 30. The number of incidents at sea fell 48 percent to 256, while 143 suspected smugglers were detained in maritime operations, far fewer than the 484 detained over all of 2024. Forty-six migrants died at sea in that same eight-month period this year, compared with 44 for all of 2024 and 59 for all of 2025.
Germany's government says Russia was behind an attempt to attack Leipzig/Halle airport with an explosive-laden drone on August 4, found near a Ukrainian cargo plane and defused before it could detonate. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the attack fits the pattern of Russian hybrid operations. In response, Germany is closing the Russian consulate in Bonn from September 18 and ending the arrangement for the Russian House cultural centre in Berlin, and wants tighter EU sanctions on Russia.
Spain's government approved an extraordinary aid package of 309 million euros for the North African enclave of Ceuta, a larger sum than the roughly 165 million euros it approved a month earlier as a first response. The new package is worth around 16 percent of the city's GDP, to be spent over the rest of 2026 on healthcare, education and water treatment, on defence and security forces, on care for unaccompanied migrant minors, and on direct support. It follows an unprecedented surge in which more than 72,000 migrants crossed into Ceuta from Morocco over two days in late July. At least a hundred people died in that crossing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian airspace is effectively becoming closed as Ukrainian drones strike ever deeper inside Russia, and urged airlines, insurers and anyone still using Russia's major airports to pull out. He stressed that Ukraine does not threaten civilian aviation as such, but that Russia's skies will have drones on a scale that has to be taken into account. Putin responded by calling the statement 'a declaration of state terrorism'.
France, Germany and nine other EU states, Sweden among them, have written to foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas asking for faster and more efficient decision-making under the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy. The letter opens the door to wider use of qualified majority voting instead of unanimity, without directly demanding a full change of system. 'We must also ensure that this culture of consensus fosters common action rather than preventing it, otherwise we will have legitimacy but no strength,' the letter states.
The United States carried out new air strikes on targets linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guard in the country's south, the most serious escalation in weeks in the confrontation around the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian officials in Hormozgan province say one strike hit a house hosting a wedding in Sirik, killing at least five people, including a child, and wounding dozens. Iran retaliated with attacks on US bases in Jordan and Bahrain; Jordan's military says it intercepted most of the strikes on its own territory.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says the former Syrian regime under Bashar al-Assad built a nuclear reactor in Deir ez-Zor without declaring it, along with a fuel fabrication facility and a fuel storage site. Inspectors visited the site on August 29 and confirmed that the excavated cooling infrastructure is consistent with a nuclear reactor. Syria's new transitional government has granted the IAEA access to long-suspected sites, unlike the Assad regime before it.
Venezuela's ruling party-dominated National Assembly voted through an oil deal with the US administration ahead of a visit to Caracas by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Under the deal, private firm North American Blue Energy Partners receives a hundred-year lease over 17 oilfields with an initial production target of 1.5 million barrels a day, in exchange for 19 dollars from every barrel sold to the US flowing to the Venezuelan state. Some opposition lawmakers abstained, criticising the fact that the deal's full terms have not yet been published.
A retrospective spanning more than seventy years of Semiha Berksoy's output, with more than 200 works by Türkiye's first female opera singer and a pioneer across visual art, film and literature. The show is an expanded version of the one presented at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, reconfigured with a new title and curatorial framework.
A group exhibition of contemporary photography and lens-based art in Türkiye, bringing together works by eighteen artists from different generations who explore imagined and real places.
An eclectic ensemble blending modern jazz with Anatolian folk music, psychedelia and afrobeat, on Zorlu PSM's open-air stage Vestel Amfi. Free entry.
Sena Şahin, a young Turkish pop artist known for her strong stage energy, performs on Zorlu PSM's open-air stage. Free entry.
President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson signed a 4.3 billion euro deal aboard the French frigate Amiral Ronarc'h, moored in Stockholm, for four French-built frigates for the Swedish navy, with the first delivery due in 2030. The Swedish Luleå-class variant combines French sensors and Aster missiles with Swedish-built systems, and the four ships are expected to triple Sweden's current naval air-defence capacity. Macron also said Sweden will be covered by the France-led nuclear umbrella initiative for allies he unveiled in March.
Twelve days before the September 13 general election, the Social Democrats are pledging what the party calls the dental reform of the century: no adult would pay more than 10 percent of the cost of most dental treatments, through a sharply strengthened high-cost protection scheme. Party leader Magdalena Andersson says the reform, expected to cost around six billion kronor, will have to be rolled out in stages over the next term rather than all at once. The party also wants to reintroduce free dental care for 19 to 23 year-olds, and says the governing Tidö parties have cut dental subsidies.